Karl Loxbo, "The fate of
intra-party democracy: Leadership autonomy and activist
influence in the mass party and the cartel party," Party
Politics, 19 (July 2013), 537-554. [Available at
http://ppq.sagepub.com/content/vol19/issue4/
]

First paragraph:
Similar to Robert Michels' (1962) classic 'iron law of
oligarchy', party scholars generally assume that elites
gradually establish control over party organizations at the
expense of members and activists (e.g. Duverger, 1954:
133-5; McKenzie, 1963; Kirscheimer, 1966; Janda, 1983;
Panebianco, 1988). This idea is particularly pronounced in
contemporary research (Allern and Pedersen, 2007: 69).
Several prominent scholars argue that modern party
organizations have forsaken ideals and practices associated
with the mass party -- for example participation,
deliberation, and leadership accountability (e.g. Hopkin,
2004: 645). Over the course of time, parties have instead
transformed into internal cartels controlled by career
professionals (e.g. Katz and Mair, 1995, 2009; Mair, 1997;
Katz, 2001; Blyth and Katz, 2005). Although new, inclusive
procedures for candidate selection appear to empower rank
and file members (e.g. Rahat et al., 2008), such reforms are
regularly claimed to be attempts by cartel party leaders to
exclude activists from policy-making (e.g. Mair, 1997:
113-14, 146-52; Katz, 2001: 290; Katz andMair, 2009: 759).
Accordingly, when comparing policy-making in the mass party
with the elites striving for autonomy in the cartel party,1
mainstream party research tends to hypothesize, implicitly
or explicitly, that intra-party democracy has declined, if
not disappeared altogether (but see Scarrow and Gezgor,
2010). However, in this article, I wish to argue that this
widely-purveyed hypothesis is too sweeping and is, at least
partly, empirically unfounded

Figures and
Tables:

Figure 1. Share of articles about pensions authored
by party leaders/official journalists (C3.1), 1954-9
compared with 1992-7 in Aktuellt i politiken (per cent of
all articles each year).

Figure 2. Share of articles only propagating for
official party policy (C 3.2),1954-9 compared with 1992-7
in Aktuellt i politiken (per cent of all articles each
year).

Last Paragraph:
(First paragraph of conclusions) This article has
scrutinized the widely-purveyed hypothesis which states that
intra-party democracy has declined since the glory days of
the mass party -- in contemporary research, most known as
the cartel party thesis (e.g. Katz and Mair, 1995, 2009;
Blyth and Katz, 2005). Drawing on a comparison between two
internal policy-making procedures within the Swedish social
democratic party (SAP), one in the 1950s and the other in
the 1990s, the article weakens this idea. If intra-party
democracy is in a general state of decline, I argue that the
comparative case study in the article should provide most
likely conditions for confirming this tendency. Yet the
results show that SAP party leaders in the 1990s, in a
critical situation where they should have had strong
incentives to obfuscate and control, instead had
considerably less leverage over policy deliberations and
activists than their predecessors in the 1950s. Moreover,
the propaganda in the party press -- pointed out as a
primary tool for oligarchic control (Michels, 1962: 149) --
seemed to constitute a potent instrument for agenda control
in the 1950s, but had evidently slipped out of the hands of
the leaders in the 1990s. Hence, in this case, intra-party
democracy has improved, not declined, over time.